onda

onda — wander the airwaves. An ethical, privacy-minded internet-radio TUI in the spirit of Radio Garden: browse stations by place, search, add your own, and listen — streaming directly from broadcasters, with nothing hosted, recorded, or rebroadcast by us. (onda is "wave" in Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian.)

Status: early v1. The bundled offline station list is a small starter set pending a full public-domain import (see Data sources).

Ethics & privacy

onda behaves like a browser pointed at a stream you chose. It connects you directly to the broadcaster's public server.

• No recording, ever.
• No geo-unblocking — region-locked streams simply fail.
• No proxy, no rebroadcast — one direct connection, nothing re-hosted.
• Silent by default — popularity tracking defaults to never, so onda reports nothing about what you listen to. You can opt in (opt-in/opt-out) in settings to contribute to community rankings if you want.
• Local-only data — favorites, custom stations, config, and (opt-in) play history never leave your machine. No telemetry.
• Public-domain data — station data comes from the public-domain Radio Browser project plus a bundled CC0 list.

Streaming inherently exposes your IP to the broadcaster, the same as any internet-radio app. Search is opt-in local. By default onda searches Radio Browser over the network as you type (debounced — one query per typing pause), exactly like other clients. If you opt in — from the first-run prompt, the hint shown after a search finds nothing, or Settings — onda downloads the full public station directory once (~30 MB, in the background with a live progress readout) and from then on searches that local copy: it becomes typo-tolerant (so raido eins still finds Radio Eins) and your queries are not sent anywhere as you type. The local list refreshes about once a week, or on demand with R. Turn it off anytime in Settings; the cached list is a plain file you can delete.

Install

onda runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows. It requires mpv on your PATH for playback.

macOS / Linux — Homebrew (recommended)

brew install pedrosousa13/tap/onda

This also installs mpv.

Windows — Scoop

scoop bucket add pedrosousa13 https://github.com/pedrosousa13/scoop-bucket
scoop install onda
scoop install mpv

Any OS — Go

go install github.com/pedrosousa13/onda@latest

Install mpv separately (brew install mpv, scoop install mpv, or your distro's package manager).

Any OS — prebuilt binary

Download the archive for your platform from the Releases page and put onda on your PATH. Ensure mpv is installed.

Updating

onda checks GitHub once a day for a newer release and shows a one-line banner when one is available. How you update depends on how you installed it:

• Homebrew: brew upgrade --cask onda
• Scoop: scoop update onda
• Prebuilt binary: press u on the banner to update in place — onda downloads the matching release archive, verifies its SHA256 against the release's checksums.txt, and atomically replaces itself. Press U to dismiss the banner.

The check is a single request to the public GitHub API (no account, no token). It's on by default; turn it off in settings (, then 5). Releases are checksum-verified today; cryptographic signing is a planned follow-up.

Usage

Launch:

onda

Keys

Browsing / favorites

Key	Action
↑/↓ or k/j	Move selection
enter	Play selected station
s	Stop
+ / -	Volume up / down
[ / ]	Higher / lower bitrate (when a station offers several)
f	Toggle favorite on selected station
F	Show favorites
r	Recently played (when play history is on)
c	Clear play history (in the recents view)
p	Popular (top-voted worldwide)
R	Refresh the local station list from Radio Browser
esc	Back to Home
/	Search
b	Browse by country / genre / language
o	Sort browse list (votes / name / trending)
O	Reverse sort order
a	Add a custom station
,	Settings
u / U	Update onda (when offered) / dismiss the update banner
esc	Back to browse
q	Quit

Mouse — the scroll wheel moves the selection, a click selects a station, and clicking the selected station again plays it. Hovering marks the row under the cursor. (Keyboard remains fully supported; the mouse is optional.)

Search — results appear as you type, instantly, from a local copy of the directory (no network round-trip, works offline). Use ↑/↓ to pick a result and enter to play it; esc cancels.

One search box covers station name, country, and genre/tags — there are no prefixes or modes, just type what you know:

• By name — kexp, radio eins
• By country — japan, portugal (country name, as Radio Browser labels it)
• By genre / tag — jazz, lo-fi, techno, news

Results are ranked best-match-first across all three fields, and small typos are tolerated — raido eins still finds Radio Eins. The local list refreshes from Radio Browser automatically about once a week; press R (in Home or a browse list) to refresh it on demand.

While a stream connects, the now-playing panel shows connecting…, then the song title once audio starts — or a clear message if the stream can't be reached.

Add a station — tab (or ↑/↓) to move between name, URL, and bitrate (optional); enter to save; esc to cancel. Custom stations are saved locally and appear alongside everything else.

Settings — 1 cycles audio quality (highest / balanced / lowest), 2 cycles popularity tracking (never / opt-in / opt-out), 3 toggles play history, 4 cycles the theme, 5 toggles the daily update check, 6 toggles live search (search as you type; off → enter-to-search), 7 toggles loudness normalization (evens out volume jumps between stations; off by default, applies live); esc to go back. Changes are saved immediately.

Recently played — when play history is on (settings 3, off by default), the stations you play are remembered locally and listed under r (newest first, de-duplicated). The latest few also surface as a recent section on Home, above your favorites. It never leaves your machine; c in the recents view clears it.

When a station offers multiple bitrates, onda auto-picks per your quality setting (default: highest).

On launch you land on Home — your now-playing panel, a recent section when play history is on, plus your favorites (or a Popular preview, the top-voted stations worldwide, until you've saved any). From anywhere: esc returns Home, p opens the full Popular list, F favorites, b browse by country/genre/language (with o/O to sort), or / search. Browse and Popular read the local station catalog and are richest once you've downloaded the full offline directory (see Settings / live search). Popular comes from Radio Browser's open ranking — reading it reports nothing about you.

Themes

Switch in settings (, then 4). Bundled: Catppuccin (Mocha, Macchiato, Frappé, Latte), Dracula, Nord, Gruvbox. Default is Catppuccin Mocha; your choice is saved to config.toml.

Configuration

Config and data live under your OS config directory (resolved via Go's os.UserConfigDir):

• Linux: ~/.config/onda/
• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/onda/
• Windows: %AppData%\onda\

Files:

• config.toml — quality (highest|balanced|lowest), tracking (never|opt-in|opt-out), history_enabled, theme, update_check (daily update check; true by default), live_search (search as you type; true by default — set false for enter-to-search), volume (0–100, restored on launch), normalize (loudness normalization; false by default)
• favorites.json, custom.json — your favorites and added stations
• recents.json — your play history (only written when history_enabled is on)

Everything onda persists lives in this one directory in plain TOML/JSON, so you can symlink or sync it with your dotfiles to carry your config and favorites across machines.

The local station list lives under your OS cache directory (os.UserCacheDir, e.g. ~/.cache/onda/ on Linux) as a gzipped snapshot of the Radio Browser directory. onda searches it locally and refreshes it from Radio Browser only when it's older than 7 days or you press R. The update check caches its result there too (update-cache.json), so onda hits GitHub at most once a day.

Defaults are privacy-first: quality highest, tracking never, history disabled.

On duplicate stations

Radio Browser is crowd-sourced and has no canonical station IDs, so the same station often appears many times (different bitrates, (Hi-Fi)/(metadata) suffixes, broadcaster prefixes like RTP , punctuation). onda merges these heuristically — normalizing names and grouping by name + country, then offering the distinct bitrates as a [ ] chooser. It's best-effort: a few stragglers may remain rather than risk merging genuinely different stations. Perfect grouping isn't possible without canonical IDs the source doesn't provide.

Data sources & credits

• Radio Browser — public-domain station directory
• deroverda/recommended-radio-streams — CC0 bundled station list
• mpv — audio playback backend
• Charm — Bubble Tea & Lip Gloss, the TUI foundation

Building from source

Requires Go 1.25+ and mpv.

git clone https://github.com/pedrosousa13/onda
cd onda
go build -o onda .
./onda

Run the tests with go test ./... (add -race if your Go has a C toolchain).

License

MIT © 2026 Pedro Sousa